Take Control of Your Learning Plan

When we were young, our learning plan was laid out for us, from pre-school to our final years of high-school before heading off to college and/or university. When we arrived at those institutions, the plan was still laid out for us, driven by our chosen field of interest with a dash of electives thrown in to spice things up.

But the courses, the reading, the workload — the plan — was all there for us to follow.

When you started your first job, you most likely had little thought to continuing down the road of structured learning — you had a job, you were earning money, you had just finished all those structured plans fraught with exams and projects and now it was time to do a little bit of life learning. Your career and on the job training took over, supplanting your structured learning plan as you struggled to gain a foothold in what you wanted to do and how you were going to do it.

Whereas before you were learning from professors and teachers, your peers and colleagues were now becoming your mentors and guides to take those foundation classes and apply them to the real world.

And for a long time, perhaps a very long time, you gave very little thought to continuing your own learning — you had enough on your plate and it kept you busy. Or perhaps your company began to offer training conferences to you so you could continue your learning — “here this looks good, it was something to do with software”.

A great thank you for all the work you have done but do you get what you really need these daily, condensed sessions, running from 8am — 4pm for 5 days, fueled by sugar snacks and the constant drinking from the fire hose of knowledge as you tried to take it all in. By the end of the week you are typically exhausted, not sure what you remember, perhaps only taking in five key points the week’s conference.

Five key points from a potential 30+ sessions?

When I look back at the last conference I attended (a little less than a year ago), of all the sessions I attended, the one I learned and took the most from was one on the last day.

One session, on the last day.

And the session was not even related to the content being delivered at the conference, it was in a completely different vein delivered by a speaker associated with the organizer.

What does it all mean?

As much as we want to breakaway from the structure of continual learning (I need a break, I’ve done school for so long, I want to experience life), it’s important for us to set a plan for how we want to grow outside of current or future jobs. This doesn’t always jive with your employer’s view on training of the “conference a year” ideal and “we hope we can send some of you” result because their goals are different than yours (and should be).

Ask yourself this question, if you had $5 a day for 365 days a year, adding up to a total of $1,825/year — what could you do with that money? Would you even need all of it? What could you accomplish? What could you learn?

Are you worth that much investment per day?

Your personal learning plan does not need to hearken back to the days of college or university where you had 3 hours of work a night, perhaps it can be a condensed course (altMBA and others), an online training subscription (pluralsight) or the consumption of books on a monthly basis. Whatever it is, set the plan, create the plan and follow it. Focus it around the goals that you want to achieve and where you want to go, irrespective of your current job or career, focus it on what you WANT to learn in order to continue growing — gardening, boating, IoT, building, carpentry, drawing, reading, etc, etc.

Only you can control your own Learning Plan, no one else will do it for you, others will offer their insight into what you should take based on their own needs and desires, but your plan to grow and develop irrespective of job and career is yours to control and is yours to run with.

Take a moment, write out the plan, write out some goals you want to achieve and then see where it takes you. A year later, take a look back at how far you have come, re-adjust for the next year, rinse and repeat.